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If you are going to actually install some portion of FreeBSD on a
drive then PLEASE BE VERY CERTAIN that the Geometry reported in the
Partition Editor (see Installation Menu) is the correct one for your
drive and controller combination!
IDE drives often have a certain geometry set during the PC BIOS setup,
or (in the case of larger IDE drives) have their geometry "remapped"
by either the IDE controller or a special boot-sector translation
utility such as that by OnTrack Systems. In these cases, knowing
the correct geometry gets even more complicated as it's not something
you can easily tell by looking at the drive or the PC BIOS setup. The
best way of verifying that your geometry is being correctly calculated
in such situations is to boot DOS (from the hard disk, not a floppy!)
and run the ``pfdisk'' utility provided in the tools/ subdirectory of the
FreeBSD CDROM or FTP site. It will report the geometry that DOS sees,
which is generally the correct one.
If you have no DOS partition sharing the disk at all, then you may find that
you have better luck with Geometry detection if you create a very small
DOS partition first, before installing FreeBSD. Once FreeBSD is installed
you can always delete it again if you need the space.
It's actually not a bad idea (believe it or not) to have a small bootable
DOS partition on your FreeBSD machine anyway: Should the machine become
unstable or exhibit strange behavior at some point in the future (which
is not uncommon behavior for PC hardware!) you can then at least use
DOS for installing and running one of the commercially available system
diagnostic utilities.
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